May in December

It may be considered gauche or tacky or even tawdry to "plug" one's own magazine, but the comedy issue of Vanity Fair really is a hummer, no innuendo intended, unless you'd like a little innuendo with your fries. Guest editor Judd Apatow and I worked closely together to ensure that I had absolutely nothing to do with this cavalcade, apart from my column.

The Nichols-May piece--by Sam Kashner, which should be read in its entirely in the print edition (great photo illos)--arrived synchronistically just as I was re-reading Edmund Wilson's Sixties Journals, one of those volumes that's a strange pick-me-up even as its author runs down, a majestic hulk of age and infirmity.

Despite his advanced years, portly bulk, poor hearing, curmudgeonly attitude, and survivor's weariness (one by one his friends and literary colleagues and dropped off the ledge, Wilson really gets around in The Sixties journals, refusing to be an indoor owl despite his prodigious drinking, reading, and writing. He was open to new things, an unusual trait in an old-fashioned man of letters, and he became infatuated with the talent of Nichols and May after hearing their records, then infatuated with their persons. They were so young then and the dazzling success of their albums and then their Broadway show An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May seemed to have dropped from the rafters, leaving them a bit dazed, in a kind of anxious exhilaration.

There are numerous passages to devoted to Nichols and May in the Journals but I'll quote only from the first meeting.

The year, 1961. The scene: The Oak Room of the Plaza. Nichols is already seated with his girlfriend, Joanna Brown, the former wife of writer and future legend Harold Brodkey.

Elaine then arrived, looking beautiful in a plain black dress with shoulder straps, and from the moment of her appearance all attention was concentrated on her. I had to make an effort at one point to transfer my attention to [the "very good looking"] Joanna. Elaine told about an incident that had happened that afternoon when she went to the Bronx. In some very public place, she had seen a woman lying in the street moaning, with a small child standing beside her. Nobody was paying any attention to her--she had evidently been knocked down. Elaine tried to find out what was the matter with her, made her wiggle her fingers and toes. 'It's easy,' she said, 'to take command in a situation like that. Nobody knows what to do, and I didn't really know myself.' But she got the police and an ambulance, and the woman was taken to I forget what hospital--'where they'll probably kill her,' said Elaine, 'the way they did with me when I was there with my arm.'"

To you this may be an anecdote; to me, it is a koan.

Wilson and May share a cab ride later that night. Afterwards he reflects, "It is a good thing I am too old to fall in love with her. I've always been such easy game for beautiful, gifted women and she is the most so I've seen since Mary McCarthy in the thirties. I imagine that she, too, would be rough going."

Cultural history might have been so different had Elaine May become Mrs. Edmund Wilson, or his tempestuous mistress. But I guess some things were just never meant to be.